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The Poems
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From Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
Hardy had been considering the publication of his first volume of verse for several years, before Wessex Poems was published by Harper & Bros in December 1898. A third of the poems dated from his first period of poetic production, the 1860s, a few were from the intervening two decades of novel-writing, and the rest were from the last decade, during which he had returned to writing poetry. There is evidence of anxiety surrounding their production: the fair copy he prepared for the printer (a manuscript now in the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery) was much revised, and more changes were made to the proofs. The volume included Hardy’s own illustrations to 31 of the poems.
The reviewers of Wessex Poems were generally respectful, but often puzzled by Hardy’s switch in genre, and critical of his pessimism, drawing comparisons with the late novels in this respect. A few were hostile: an anonymous reviewer in the Saturday Review, 7 January 1899, called the ballads ‘some of the most amazing balderdash that ever found its way into a book of verse’ (Cox 1970: 320). Perhaps the most positive reviewer was E.K. Chambers in the Athenaeum, who found the poems narrow in range but anticipated later reviewers (and Ezra Pound) in finding Hardy’s work ‘of a kind with which modern poetry can ill afford to dispense. There is no finish or artifice about it: the note struck is strenuous, austere, forcible’ (Cox 1970: 327). Hardy paid more attention to the reviews of his first volume of poetry than to any subsequent one: he thanked Lionel Johnson and William Archer for kindly comments, but was stung by criticism. He later argued that ‘Almost all the fault-finding was, in fact, based on the one great antecedent conclusion that an author who has published prose first, and that largely, must necessarily express himself badly in verse’ (LY 76), adding that ‘In the reception of this and later volumes of Hardy’s poems there was, he said, as regards form, the inevitable ascription to ignorance of what was really choice after full knowledge’ (LY 78).
A corrected second edition of Wessex Poems was issued by Macmillan in 1903, after they had taken over from Harper as Hardy’s publishers, as volume XVIII of the new Uniform Edition of his works. The volume was substantially revised for the Wessex Edition in 1912, and (in the same period) for the Collected Poems which finally appeared in 1919; other editions contain minor revisions (for commentary on revisions, see Zeitlow 1974: 29–35).
Preface
The first of a series of defensive prefaces which Hardy wrote for his volumes. Paul Zeitlow, in his reading of the Preface, sees in it a deliberate amateurishness expressive of the ‘tension between the desire to commit himself and the desire to remain invulnerable’ (1974: 35–7).
Of the miscellaneous collection of verse that follows, only four pieces have been published, though many were written long ago, and others partly written. In some few cases the verses were turned into prose and printed as such in a novel, it not having been anticipated at that time that they might [5] see the light in their original shape.
Here and there, when an ancient and legitimate word still current in the district, for which there was no close equivalent in received English, suggested itself, it has been made use of, on what seemed good grounds.
The pieces are in a large degree dramatic or personative in conception; [10] and the dates attached to some of the poems do not apply to the rough sketches given in illustration, which have been recently made, and, as may be surmised, are inserted for personal and local reasons rather than for their intrinsic qualities.
T.H.
September 1898.
1 The Temporary the All
(Sapphics)
The opening poem of Wessex Poems, subsequently included in Selected Poems (1916). It was accompanied by Hardy’s illustration of a sundial and shadow on a tower of Hardy’s house, Max Gate, suggesting the theme of time and contingency (the sundial was designed by Hardy, but only installed after his death). The manuscript is heavily revised, and Hardy made a number of changes to later editions (as in all subsequent poems, variants are given selectively here).
Most critics have agreed with James Richardson’s description of this poem as ‘militantly odd’ in style, a...
